Posted
by
Soulskill
on Friday June 28, 2013 @09:12AM
from the lalalalalala-i-can't-hear-you dept.

New submitter crashcy writes "According to a spokesman for the U.S. Army, the military organization is 'blocking all access to The Guardian newspaper's reports about the National Security Agency's sweeping collection of data about Americans' email and phone communications.' The spokesman goes on to state that it is routine to block access where classified materials may be distributed. The term used was 'network hygiene.' 'Campos wrote if an employee accidentally downloaded classified information, it would result in "labor intensive" work, such as the wipe or destruction of the computer's hard drive. He wrote that an employee who downloads classified information could face disciplinary action if found to have knowingly downloaded the material on an unclassified computer.'"

There is still value in maintaining a document's classified status even after the information has been released publicly. Just because CNN or some website has released a secret doesn't mean that Bad Guy X happened to be paying attention enough to go ahead and download the information. If information becomes automatically declassified the moment someone leaks it, you are just making it that much easier for future bad guys to acquire that knowledge. There is something to be said for making it as hard as possible for our enemies to acquire information that can be used against us. No need to make it easier for them by acquire it. Make them do the work necessary to seek out those sources that may have leaked it.

In this particular case, however, the Bad Guys would have had to have been on a 6-week drunk in the middle of the desert to have missed it. And still be there. If they had to do any less work it would be because door-to-door salesmen were peddling it on the streets.

I can understand the need to be cautious about leaked information, since those in the know are at risk for letting more things be known than had actually been known. Still, there comes a point where you can have the absurd situation where the bad

Sorry, but that's a lame argument; it makes far more sense to assume that bad guys always notice, because in fact they generally do.

The major source of classification it twofold: prevent one's own citizenry from knowing something being 'done in their name' and preventing embarrassment of a higher. The latter runs around 80%, the result from three separate studies done at or at the behest of presidential level. Look the stuff up. Last I looked they hadn't been classified.

This isn't about preventing employees from knowing. It's about keeping classified information off of unclassified networks.

By blocking a publicly accessible journalism website?

Yes. What's so hard to understand here? There are a bunch of federal employees and contractors who simply aren't allowed to have access to various sorts of classified information, no matter where that information comes from or how public it is.

It is a silly rule in this situation, but a rule just the same. We had this before, when the diplomatic cables were leaked and the army put out a notice that anyone caught reading about the contents would be disciplined.

It is a silly rule in this situation, but a rule just the same. We had this before, when the diplomatic cables were leaked and the army put out a notice that anyone caught reading about the contents would be disciplined.

That doesn't justify anything. That's basically "The army responded idiotically in the past, so they should respond idiotically now." Classification should depend on how you got it for reasons that should be obvious. If it's printed in a newspaper worldwide, how the hell are you supposed to know it's classified information? And then there is the obvious "It's not secret at this point so the damage has been done."

If it's printed in a newspaper worldwide, how the hell are you supposed to know it's classified information?

Official stance is that, should you accidentally encounter classified information somewhere (e.g. Wikipedia), you neither confirm nor deny its accuracy. Then report it. Then the "powers that be" essentially nuke the computer from orbit.

Seems more logical to neither confirm nor deny, then proceed to ignore.

The problem is that government rules aren't really set up to handle major leaks like this. The whole sanitization process assumes that the information is still on government controlled computers handled by people with some level of clearance, even though they don't have 'need to know'. So you tell them to shut up about it, and it normally works because a random piece of classified material isn't normally worth all that much.

There are supposed to be processes in place to, when possible, 'neither confirm nor deny; then ignore', but the problem here is that the source is credible and the NSA failed to discredit him(rightly or wrongly). So now it's confirmed. One of the rules for classifying information is that it can't be public; available on free news sites counts as 'public', but the way the rules are written, only the classification authority(or people over it) can declare the information no longer classified due to compromise. In this case the CA would be the NSA; which is currently running around like a chicken without a head trying to get Snowden without really dealing with the actual leak.

If it is available from a public web site then the information is no longer "classified", but public knowledge. You can not put the genie back in the bottle.The internet has no delete button and the Army has no neuralizers.

The thinking and the process here is flawed. Once information is leaked it should be "de-classified", since that's what it is. To continue trying to operate as though the leaked information is still somehow magically top-secret is insanity.

Oh, right this is the Army, where Process A Requires Solution B, So Do C Instead is command's modus operandi.

No, it actually makes sense.

Suppose your objective is to prevent malware from appearing on your PC. (or secure a server.) This isn't a Windows-vs-Unix thing, the answer is the same for what happens when a server gets rooted.

What's the best thing to do when your PC has malware on it? When a server is rooted? You wipe the disk and reinstall the OS from a known good image. It's the only way to be sure that not a single byte of malware/rootkit remains on the disk.

That's the objective. Not one byte of bad stuff on the disk. A single NOP in the wrong place could open a back door.

You could spend a few hours editing registry keys, burning a CD of the contents of/bin from a known good workstation and copying the files over, doing a byte-by-byte comparison of/bin/cp and/bin/ls, and so on, but you'd never be completely sure the system wasn't compromised. If you got rid of the malware and any back doors left by whoever rooted the system, you're fine.

That's what the.mil folks are trying to do with their networks, except that instead of "malware", it's "classified information on computers used for unclassified work."

And it's not as silly as it sounds. You want to know that if malware exists on your system, there's something wrong. In PC terms, there's no harm done by users downloading dancing-bunnies.exe as long as they never actually run it. (Maybe it's a false positive -- the user was merely going to spend a lunch break disassembling it to understand how the exploit was written... Maybe they're downloading a Linux rootkit for analysis on a PC, or vice versa. But how can you tell the difference between that and someone downloading a Linux rootkit with the intention of maliciously installing it on a Linux server that can only be accessed through the compromised PC...)

If you only have one user, you could ask them, but if you have 100,000 users, you can't. You just don't have enough sysadmins to nicely ask everyone on the network if their copy of the rootkit was downloaded deliberately with no intent of using it to harm the network, or if there's something seriously wrong. So you say "Sorry, no dancing-bunnies.exe on this part of the LAN. If you want to do virus research, do it at home, or, if we think you're smart enough, we'll give you a PC on the portion of the network that we've separated from the company LAN, and you can do research there without any risk of the dancing bunnies spreading to other users..."

And then you wipe the disk and reinstall the OS from a known good image.

The only reason classified information should appear on an unclassified machine is if there's a security breach. If every innocent download of dancing-bunnies.exe results in a nuke-and-reinstall on sight, your security researchers will stop doing it on the company LAN, eliminating the false positives.

Actually, it is. Wiping disks to get rid of malware is an entirely different thing, and has absolutely no correlation with army personnel somehow having to somehow "unsee" or pretend they can't see something that is already in the public domain.

Still looking at it the wrong way around - the purpose is to keep classified data off of unclassified machines, not to get the operators to "unlearn" things they've read about. I'm sure the.mil IT group would love it for somebody with authority to declassify the documents - but until that happens, part of their job is to keep classified materials off of unclassified hardware within their control. They know the stuff is out there and that they can't put the genie back in the bottle, that doesn't mean they'r

Why target the Guardian then, except spite that they broke the story and had (or have) direct contact with Snowden? The information has already spread all over the internet, they can't block access to it all.
I don't know what the process is for officially declassifying the information, but I don't see how you can really call something that's public knowledge classified anymore.

One good reason would be because not all disclosure of classified information is equally broad, and rather than defining some complex standard to determine whether the information is truly and completely out of the bag, they simply require evaluation according to a set process to declassify it.

Re Such as? (I'm really curious)
It stops a keyword tracking feedback loops forming that drags in more casual at 'work' readers. Now if your home or at a rented house off base and start reading more and more about the subject... thats more interesting to the US gov.
Thats the neat trick the USA has over the internet - they can watch people of interest ie with a real security clearance and see how they use the net/react over time.
If ~100 contractors and other base staff read the Guardian at home long term - something is different. Testing should have found people like that and never advanced them.
There was a low point in the GCHQ due to very low wages, useless military supervision and home sickness that allowed the Soviets to gain a few useful people just due to basic pay and conditions.
The US wants to find the same "people", making reading the documents 'wrong' could make traits to become clear.
If everyone is allowed to read the documents it gets hard - who is just following the news and who is of interest long term.
It is the same for.mil education - who uses the base or mil/edu university computers to search wikileaks when using such texts is 'not' good.
The other reason is the cross clearances of the leak hunters vs the staff just looking at work.
A person at work might be cleared for lets say project FARM but the surveillance staff and their admins might only be cleared for lower level work/side projects.
So more people have to be called in to talk to the surveillance staff and their interest in project FARM...
Best just to say no reading and let the tracking teams go to work.

I'd imagine they blocked The Guardian as it's a British paper and so can't be leaned on like the bulk of US corporate media can.
Also, their coverage is very well researched, comprehensive and persuasive. They don't want their personnel getting ideas.
I also wouldn't rule out small-minded pettiness.

Please explain the press freedoms the UK lacks and how that would mean The Guardian can be leaned on.
The paper isn't owned by a large corp, unlike so many in the US. Also, you're deluded if you think the UK govt would do the US a favor and "play ball" by somehow gagging Greenwald & Co.
Cameron's government is on shaky enough ground as it is without them trying to threaten journalists at the behest of the US. You're not thinking.

This isn't about preventing employees from knowing. It's about keeping classified information off of unclassified networks.

umm but it manifests only as preventing employees from knowing.. or are they afraid chinese hackers who also can't get to guardian to get the information from their hacked network.

apparently it's their automatic filtering - but doesn't sound like too smart filtering unless it's meant to keep the troops from questioning legitimacy of some actions.it is public information after all, available in printed form from any newsstand. sure, it was meant to be kept secret but can't put the cat back in the bag.

This isn't about preventing employees from knowing. It's about keeping classified information off of unclassified networks.

Once it's made public, then what's the point of keeping it designated as "classified"? If it's already known to be in the hands of the public and the "bad guys", what possible justification is there for keeping it out of the hands of the "good guys"?

My guess is this is an IT problem for them. They likely have scripts that troll un-classified networks looking for keywords that would indicated classified material and gotten onto them. When they find one, they flag it and investigate. They've probably had a huge spike in hits because of this, with most of them leading back to the guardian. Until they update their scripts they probably thought the easiest solution was to block the website. Just a guess...

Classified information is not declassified just because it is made public! It still carries whatever classification was originally assigned to it until its classification is formally changed. If you work in an industry where classified information is present (ANY industry in the US, not just the military) and you access leaked classified information on an unclassified network (your phone, your home computer, etc.) then you are in violation of the rules. End of story. The Army isn't being stupid or tryin

Classified information is not declassified just because it is made public! It still carries whatever classification was originally assigned to it until its classification is formally changed. If you work in an industry where classified information is present (ANY industry in the US, not just the military) and you access leaked classified information on an unclassified network (your phone, your home computer, etc.) then you are in violation of the rules. End of story. The Army isn't being stupid or trying to hide things, they are trying to protect their own people.

Of course, if they were really trying to protect their people, they could say that "Previously classified information that has been released to public news organizations and made publicly available may be accessed by military personnel with no repercussions." Do they really want their own personnel to be less informed than the general public? It's not like preventing soldiers from reading the information is going to keep it out of the hands of the "enemy".

Do they really want their own personnel to be less informed than the general public? It's not like preventing soldiers from reading the information is going to keep it out of the hands of the "enemy".

That's not what they're trying to do at all. It's a bureaucratic measure because they don't want any classified material -- regardless of how it was obtained -- stored on unclassified DoD computers. That avoids the problem of people finding it later and having to go through the whole procedure of figuring out how it got there. It's easier to take reasonable measures to keep classified material off the computers in the first place. (It's still kind of stupid, but at least it has a reason.)

Of course, if they were really trying to protect their people, they could say that "Previously classified information that has been released to public news organizations and made publicly available may be accessed by military personnel with no repercussions." Do they really want their own personnel to be less informed than the general public? It's not like preventing soldiers from reading the information is going to keep it out of the hands of the "enemy".

Classification authority stems from Presidential Executive Order. The Army (or any other Government component) can not counter that.

Except it hasn't been "released" to public news organizations. It was LEAKED. There is a formal release process, and it was NOT followed. The documents remain classified until formally declassified, at which point they MAY be released to the news or the public, at the discretion of the document owner. . .

Except it hasn't been "released" to public news organizations. It was LEAKED. There is a formal release process, and it was NOT followed. The documents remain classified until formally declassified, at which point they MAY be released to the news or the public, at the discretion of the document owner. ..

"Leaked" or "released" is a matter of semantics and it depends which side of the fence you're on, but the end result is the same. Whether the president of the united states himself handed over the information or a low level analyst handed it over, the information is out in the public for all to read. Well, all except for the military and others in the government with security clearance, they still aren't allowed to read it and can be prosecuted for reading the news on their home computer.

Of course, if they were really trying to protect their people, they could say that "Previously classified information that has been released to public news organizations and made publicly available may be accessed by military personnel with no repercussions.".

Of course, that means that anyone can declassify information by anonymously leaking it to the press.

Of course, if they were really trying to protect their people, they could say that "Previously classified information that has been released to public news organizations and made publicly available may be accessed by military personnel with no repercussions.".

Of course, that means that anyone can declassify information by anonymously leaking it to the press.

Yeah, that's kind of the point behind anonymously leaking it to the press -- making the information public. And once it's public, keeping it out of the hands of military personnel is inane - if our enemies can read the information in the newspaper, why can't our soldiers?

Classified information is not declassified just because it is made public! It still carries whatever classification was originally assigned to it until its classification is formally changed. If you work in an industry where classified information is present (ANY industry in the US, not just the military) and you access leaked classified information on an unclassified network (your phone, your home computer, etc.) then you are in violation of the rules. End of story. The Army isn't being stupid or trying to hide things, they are trying to protect their own people.

Of course, if they were really trying to protect their people, they could say that "Previously classified information that has been released to public news organizations and made publicly available may be accessed by military personnel with no repercussions." Do they really want their own personnel to be less informed than the general public? It's not like preventing soldiers from reading the information is going to keep it out of the hands of the "enemy".

actually it is an old tactic for certain military action to keep rank and file soldiers disinformed about what they are doing, even if the villagers down the road know.

Do they really want their own personnel to be less informed than the general public?

Have you been keeping up with military suicide statistics? The answer is yes, yes they do. How would you feel if you'd thought you were fighting for freedom and democracy, killing people for it in fact, and then you found out that you have neither at home, and in fact the people you're working for are actively acting to suppress them? I don't know either, because I've never taken a job whose description involves flying to other countries, meeting new and interesting people and killing them, but I suspect it

Then whoever classified the information and had such little control over it that a low level analyst contractor could walk out the door with thousands of pages of classified information should be saying it.

Britain must hold some sort of record. We classified the existence of a gigantic communications tower covered in microwave antennas bang in the middle of London for many years. The thing was and still is a major landmark, even though it was carefully excised from all official maps of the city and it was illegal to publicly admit its existence.

Classified information is not declassified just because it is made public!

Well that seems a bit like saying "Horses are officially not out of the barn until they have been categorized as 'out of the barn,' and they're not yet." That may be the official policy, but it's fucking ridiculous and should be changed to reflect reality.

What they're referring to is blocking of site access on NIPRNet [wikipedia.org], which is the "unclass" side of US military network operations, but is still subject to additional scrutiny and a strict requirement that no information that has been classified be stored on connected systems. This is standard protocol bordering on the boring for office communications in the military, and is absolute non-news.

Nobody is actively working (well, okay, not openly working) to restrict communications viewed by active duty DoD personnel on their personal computers while utilizing Internet connections not-uplinked-in-the-barracks-or-other-stupid-places-where-you-know-your-traffic-is-being-logged-shipmate. Military personnel are keenly aware that they face serious legal penalties for improperly accessing and or disseminating classified materials. This is not difficult to understand.

It's worth noting that in this particular case, I firmly believe Snowden acted as a patriot and is absolutely not the traitor he's being painted as by the administration and various members of Congress. I say this as a former service member myself (Navy) who also held a TS/SCI clearance. This young man exposed wholesale disregard for our Constitution on a massive scale, and it's been happening at an increasing pace for about twenty years. I ardently hope he finds asylum somewhere safe.

I want to thank you for your service, and I agree 100% on Snowden being a patriot.. I believe, a patriot on a par with many of the patriots of the first American revolution.. You may notice I said the "first American revolution"..This is because I'm firmly convinced we're in the early times of the second American revolution..I'm a 63 year old Vietnam vet, and am sickened daily by the sewage that controls the government... A lot of us suspected for a long time what Mr Snowden exposed, but with his disclosure

Do you at least find it interesting that NOBODY in Russia or China has any secrets that they are willing to give Wikileaks? I hope you don't believe that those societies are so perfect that they have nothing untoward going on at all.

We all know that Russia and China abuse human rights, China has a great firewall, China for sure logs everyone's traffic. And they don't try to cover up the fact. The Russians don't even try to cover up the fact their elections are not fair, for instance when pressed by a BBC journalist over the way candidates not blessed by Putin were not getting any airtime, the Russian official being interviewed sort of shrugged (I imagine, it was on the radio...) and said, "Yes it

Which is why I chose to not re-enlist. Granted, my re-enlistment window was over a year ago (before this all came out), but what I saw our elected officials doing made me realize they were a greater threat to our freedom and constitution than any terrorist would ever be... I couldn't in good conscience swear an oath to defend the constitution from both enemies both foreign and DOMESTIC, and sleep well at night knowing I was breaking that oath every day I marched in step to the idiots that are leading our country into the "dustbin of history." I know Ronald Reagan isn't the most popular president here on Slashdot, but here is a very cogent remark he made:

“Someone once said that every form of government has one characteristic peculiar to it and if that characteristic is lost, the government will fall. In a monarchy, it is affection and respect for the royal family. If that is lost the monarch is lost. In a dictatorship, it is fear. If the people stop fearing the dictator he'll lose power. In a representative government such as ours, it is virtue. If virtue goes, the government fails. Are we choosing paths that are politically expedient and morally questionable? Are we in truth losing our virtue? . . . If so, we may be nearer the dustbin of history than we realize.”

You may not have noticed, and may be in denial, but the relevant part for the United States today is âoeSomeone once said that every form of government has one characteristic peculiar to it and if that characteristic is lost, the government will fall. In a monarchy, it is affection and respect for the royal family. If that is lost the monarch is lost. In a dictatorship, it is fear. If the people stop fearing the dictator he'll lose power. In a representative government such as ours, it is virtue. If vi

I seriously doubt NSA lied to the President. And they only lied to Congress because they knew that the Congressmen didn't really give a shit and were just putting on a nice show for the cameras. If they had thought for a second that Congress might actually follow up on their answers (or that the press even had the ABILITY to follow up), they would have parsed their language much more carefully.

Assuming you're referring to Bill Clinton, he was fully impeached (a function of the House of Representatives, analogous to indictment), but then not removed from office by the Senate. The article of impeachment that passed accused him of lying to a grand jury and obstruction of justice, but not lying under oath to Congress.

"Collection and analysis of content is NSA's traditional way of reporting SIGINT. Content generally refers to words spoken during a telephone conversation or the written text of an email message. NSA collection of the content of telephony and Internet communications under the PSP improved its ability to produce intelligence on terrorist-related activity. For example, by allowing NSA access to links carrying communications with one end in the United States, NSA significantly increased its access to transitin

The source of this madness comes from the regulations that were intended to be applied in an entirely different scenario. An unclassified computer could be used to store classified data that wasn't leaked yet, so the rule was there to protect the information from leaking out in the first place. Of course the geniuses who wrote the rules didn't think of massive leaks where tens or even hundreds of thousands of pages of class

I have yet to see anything leak from a print newspaper onto my computer.

If you had a classified document from a website publishing those documents, how would they guarantee that is the source for your document? Since the document is still classified even if publicly available, why do you have it on that computer?

The rule isn't that they bomb the Guardian's servers and the homes of people accessing those documents. Blocking access to the servers and warning government employees and contractors will do.

Therein lies the problem. Wish wish, shoo shoo, go away problem! Kids may be learning it in grade school, but if someone has a stamp somewhere saying it's classified, then come hell or high water, classified it must remain. That's the kind of rulemaking that only career bureaucrats can come up with.

To see the knee-jerk comments on this story in the tech news. I honestly thought that the collective inteligence level of the people who read tech news was a little higher.

The DoD is not trying to censor what service men and women see. No one is saying that they cannot go look at these websites from their own personal omputers. What is going on, is that the DoD is trying to prevent CLASSIFIED data from being loaded onto, looked at, and stored in the caches of UNCLASSIFIED government owned computers, something refered to as spillage. I'm staying out of the argument on legal precendet about classified data in the public domain, the government says the data is still classified, so if it ends up on an unclas system, that system has to be wiped, sometimes a great expense.

No one could care less if military members looked at whatever they want to at home, but the computers that they use at work belong to the government and thus the government can dictate what can and cannot be viewed on those computers. Just like the comouter and network at a civilian place of employment, your employer can dictate what you can and cannot use your company owned computer to do.

As one of the militaried greatest detractors, I agree completely with your take on it. This is not some boneheaded attempted to put their head in the sand. No, this is just a hamfisted application of blind policy.

This is really more like the military version of "Office Space" than anything else.

Lt. Lumberg: "Um yah, didn't you get the memo about the classified documents? They can't be on machines that are not authorized or accessed by unauthorized people"Pvt Gibbons: "Yes I saw the memo, and I understand th

That's not their decision to make. A different part of the executive could declassify it, sure, but in the meantime, the DoD is just dealing with the bureaucratic reality of regulations concerning classified data.

Campos wrote if an employee accidentally downloaded classified information, it would result in "labor intensive" work, such as the wipe or destruction of the computer's hard drive

All a hacker needs to do is hack some website commonly used by the military (army.mil?) and post some leaked classified information on it, or send an email blast to army.mil email addresses with the classified information, and the Army will be forced to wipe thousands of computers, and maybe discipline soldiers for having classified information on their insecure computer (rules, are rules, right?)

That isn't new information. They're suppressing a newspaper from reaching people, solely because of something that newspaper published. Regardless of intent, the message is that members of the military aren't allowed to get their news from sources the U.S. government disagrees with. And the only excuse seems to be expediency of enforcement of classified documents. That are now widely available anyways.

Of course the army is going to block access to the guardian. There have been several stories published there that prove the US government is listening to the private phone calls of the troops, including tape recording their phone sex and passing it around the office as entertainment.

Army officials are then quoted in the same articles as saying that the troops should know that their phone calls are not private.

I mean really, who wants the troops to know this and be all demoralized and shit, we need to spy

Gordon Van Vleet, an Arizona-based spokesman for the Army Network Enterprise Technology Command, or NETCOM, said in an email the Army is filtering "some access to press coverage and online content about the NSA leaks."

He wrote it is routine for the Department of Defense to take preventative "network hygiene" measures to mitigate unauthorized disclosures of classified information.

"We make every effort to balance the need to preserve information access with operational security," he wrote, "however, there are strict policies and directives in place regarding protecting and handling classified information."

So what happens if activists start mass-emailing the Guardian article to @mil email addresses -- will NETCOM's "strict policies" require that they disable the DoD's email servers?

"Activists"? You mean the kind of people who want to give succour to regimes like those of Russia and China? The kind of people who resent the fact that their world view was decisively destroyed when the Berlin Wall came down? They aren't "activists"; they're bloody fools.

Of all the things I have seen the US do to its own people,this is one of the most appalling! The United States cannot function without the oversight of its people. The people who did this should be arrested and charged with treason, but that is indeed the problem in the first place. Those few people who systematically worked to undermine the spirit of the US Constitution and The Bill of Rights, are now scared. They know that they must try to fight not to lose their power over us.They know that if they lose, they might go to prison, and I hope with every fiber of my being that the do lose their power, that they do go to prison. No citizen is safe, no freedom cannot exist in the climate they dare to make for us. Please stop them. Please help do something if it is only what each one of you can. Help in your own way, but please help.

I worked for a military contractor once and was told that there was a good reason not to talk about classified material even after it appeared in the press. Our enemies couldn't be sure that the press reports were right, not without confirmation from classified sources.

The military has now done what I was told not to, confirming the authenticity of the Guardian report.

You are crossing two streams there: enemy and guilty. Guilt or innocence is a legal question. Enemy or friendly is generally a political / military question.

When an enemy in war kills someone but acts in accordance with the law of war, there is no question of guilt or innocent since there is no crime.When an enemy in war kills someone but doesn't act in accordance with the law of war, they may be guilty of a war crime.When a citizen kills at any time, they may be guilty of a crime, but unless they align

The military has now done what I was told not to, confirming the authenticity of the Guardian report.

The President and the Director of National Intelligence had already confirmed that authenticity of the source materials presented in the Guardian report when they claimed that the Guardian story was misleading on the program because it presented information from that source material selectively and out of context.

So there is nothing confirmed by blocking access to it that hasn't already been confirmed at the

Any question over the legitimacy of these documents has long since been resolved. The information is out there, and at least some of it (the official documents at least if not Snowden's commentary) is confirmed to be accurate. You can't put that cat back in the bag, so the military is not revealing anything by blocking those sites - especially since the block is broad and doesn't shed any light on whether specific portions of what was said is accurate.

I suppose the NSA could classify the fact that Clorox bleach plus ammonia makes POISON GAS. Just about every man, woman and child on the planet already knows it, but I am not aware of any limit to what they can arbitrarily classify.

It's not in the public domain. It is leaked classified information. It won't be in the public domain until 75 years after the death of its author, or the heat death of the universe less a day, whichever comes later.